How BlockStamp is Taking Communications Privacy to a Whole New Level
As we wrote before, we’re putting the finishing touches on BlockStamp Communicator. We’re aiming to launch before Christmas. Hopefully you’ll be able to send your letter to Santa with bulletproof privacy ;)
In this article, we’ll explain what these finishing touches are and why there’s so important.
First, remember that transactions on blockchains like Bitcoin and BlockStamp are not private, per se.
Bitcoin and Bitcoin forks like BlockStamp are built to be pseudonymous, not anonymous.
Obviously, you don’t need to provide any personal details to get a BlockStamp address or send BST to someone else.
But when you send a transaction, it has a history. The inputs of one transaction are the outputs of another one. One of the key features of such a blockchain is being able to trace transactions back over time.
Practically speaking, it is tough for an adversary to do something with that information. So this level of privacy is acceptable for many users. It’s certainly better than the level of privacy you’ll get with an electronic fiat transfer, anyway.
But blockchain forensic analysis capabilities are getting better all the time. If you know what you’re doing, you can piece together a fairly accurate picture of what is going on the blockchain and get started peeling back the onion, so to speak.
That means for a greater level of privacy for such blockchain transactions you’ll have to use a mixer e.g. CoinJoin.
When you pay a BlockStamp transaction fee to send a BlockStamp Communicator message, you have the same level of privacy as when you transfer BST.
That is to say: your level of privacy is pretty damn good.
Sending a message via BlockStamp Communicator means putting encrypted text into the blockchain. Doing so involves paying a transaction fee to reward a BlockStamp miner for including your message in a block.
It probably won’t be realistic for anyone to put the effort into tracing where that transaction fee came from, i.e. your BlockStamp address.
But when you pay the transaction fee, running a trace is technically possible. We want to give the option of making it technically impossible.
When you DON’T pay the BlockStamp transaction fee to send a BlockStamp Communicator message, you have an unprecedented level of privacy.
When sending a message in BlockStamp Communicator there are two ways to get the transaction fee paid:
- You pay it yourself. You’ll get excellent privacy, as above.
- The BlockStamp blockchain will handle the transaction fee on your behalf. You’ll get the best level of privacy we’re aware of! This functionality is the main finishing touch we’re working on now.
The key point is that when you don’t handle the transaction fee, the blockchain does not contain any link between you and your message.
Here’s how BlockStamp makes it possible:
Instead of paying to send the message, you can work to send it.
Actually, your computer computer processor will do the work.
Technically speaking, your computer processor will “mine” the transaction, which you can think of as a miniature variation of the work that miners’ processors do when mining blocks.
On proof-of-work blockchains like BlockStamp, this sort of work gets rewarded. You probably knew, for example, that there are block rewards for block miners.
And now on the BlockStamp blockchain there are transaction rewards for “transaction miners” — that’s you if you send a message in BlockStamp Communicator this way.
These BlockStamp transaction rewards are special for two reasons:
- They are automatically generated on the blockchain. This ability to automatically generate BST is one of the BlockStamp blockchain’s most innovative features. It powers the massive, instantaneous BlockStamp Games lotto payouts that you can get without waiting for other players’ funds to accumulate. You can read more about it here.
- You don’t get the reward for mining your transaction. The blockchain makes the reward available to block miners to encourage them to pick up your transaction like they would other BlockStamp blockchain transactions. In other words, for BlockStamp miners it will be business as usual.
As a result, your BlockStamp Communicator message will be put into the BlockStamp blockchain with no record of your having put it there.
Voila! You’ve achieved a whole new level of communications privacy.
In closing, there are two things to keep in mind:
- You are of course welcome to mine BST yourself and use these mined funds to pay the transaction fee for sending a BlockStamp Communicator message. In principle, this would also be an anonymous way to send messages without using “transaction mining” approach we’ve outlined above. But mining BST with limited processing power — like you have on your laptop, for example — can take a while and may not be worth it.
- Sending BlockStamp Communicator messages via the “transaction mining” approach will not be as fast as sending them by paying the transaction fee directly. That’s because your computer will need to do its work. But mining a transaction will be much faster than mining an entire BlockStamp block. We anticipate it may take your computer 5–10 minutes or so.
We’ll let you know when we launch!
Make sure you’re part of the BlockStamp social community and feel free to ask any questions there!
About BlockStamp:
BlockStamp is a Bitcoin blockchain fork hosting an ecosystem of fair play apps, including a true-odds multiplayer crypto gambling platform, a decentralized marketplace listing optimizer, and a private messenger with sword-in-the-stone encryption (launching soon).
